feedmec00kies

I have no answers, but I know uncooked rice is often recommended for drying cellphones and other small electronics that get accidentally submerged, as seen on Lifehacker a few years ago.

These Crash hot potatoes I first learned about from The Pioneer Woman. Boil potatoes in salted water, place them on a greased baking sheet, and squish all of them flattish. Oil, season, roast. Works fine with a small number if you do it in a pan on the stovetop, and you can flip them if you'd like.

Empty refrigerator (minus common condiments) and cabinets (especially no spices). Edit: Okay, I suppose that's more a sign of someone who doesn't cook, although a lack of spices in the kitchen of someone who does is definitely a problem.

I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that it's one of these, though I don't know which one: http://www.denby.co.uk/new-cookshop/knives+blocks/icat/knives/

I bought a pair of sturdier dishwashing gloves at Broadway Panhandler a while back (they are blue , but not the ones you linked to) and have been pretty happy with them. Part of the reason I wear dishwashing gloves, besides not wanting my hands to dry out, is because I like to be able to wash dishes with hot water. These are definitely better for doing that, because they're thicker. I don't remember if I have ever had an issue with the cheap yellow ones getting holes, but I did replace them somewhat regularly so there was obviously some issue after a while. I have had these ones for months, maybe even a year, and the only reason I have to replace them is because they don't insulate as well as they used to. I'd go for it, honestly, but I figure $10 isn't that expensive lesson if they don't work out. Just try and see if a particular pair feels stronger and thicker. Edit: I was wrong. I double-checked, and I have the blue ones you linked to, as edited above.

I think with establishments like Ess-a-Bagel, the "no toasting" policy is at least in part because they view such requests as an affront to the quality of their product. I wouldn't want to toast a (good) fresh bagel if I'm having cream cheese on it, but love buttered bagels toasted dark so the butter soaks in, and think a good bagel being handled this way is even better.

I find maple syrup alone to be much too sweet, albeit delicious, but if I have no other options I'll use it sparingly. I've always preferred some sort of high-quality fruit preserves, compote, or jam on my pancakes. After our one and only trip to the highly anticipated, poorly executed, and short-lived Permanent Brunch, where I had pancakes with creme fraiche and plum compote, I've since enjoyed adding creme fraiche or sour cream along with the fruit preserves or compote.

OliverB, just to be clear, the fishy smell is a phenomenon that occurs when heating the oil. It doesn't (or at least shouldn't) smell fishy in the bottle. Edit: I should further clarify by saying that it happens when heating the oil to a high temperature, as with frying.

The price, neutrality, and availability is great, but the smell can be too much for me. Quite unfortunate. We'll finish off the bottle and then I'm going to look for a different go-to neutral flavored oil. (And Chris Amirault, in this case I'm fairly certain that the smell wasn't a result of rancidity. The bottle is pretty new. I could always be wrong, though.)

When was it readjusted? My husband used canola oil to cook something last week (from a bottle purchased maybe a month ago). Despite the fact that I didn't see him pour oil into the pan I knew he used canola because of the overwhelming smell. It prompted a household ban by me, and I like fish.

Maybe like dry lemon peel, citric acid, and cayenne pepper mixed together and sprinkled on?

When I hear "Whole Paycheck," I'm reminded of the reaction that Fairway got when they first opened their Long Island location. A lot of people complained it was expensive, but my parents--my mother is a bargain hunter who goes probably too far to save money--pointed out that a lot of this criticism of grocery receipts adding up to more was because those higher quality, more expensive products were simply easily available in a local supermarket for pretty much the first time, and a lot of it was impulse buys. (For what it's worth, my parents still shop regularly at the LI Fairway but almost never go to Stop and Shop, which I think says something about prices.) Like any other grocery store, Whole Foods has some things cheaper and some other items more expensive than other stores. It all depends on what kind of items you choose to buy there; if you're only buying brand-name products, your grocery bill will run higher than if you stick with their store brand, just like any store. Personally, we go to Whole Foods when we want to cook something specific because another store is more convenient. I see no true price difference, at least if you ignore the inevitable impulse buys I make when I'm shopping alone.

There's hot sauce on the market, made by extracting the capsaicin. I'm not sure if this is the only brand, but I've seen this one in stores before: Frostbite Clear You can also buy pure capsaicin but a very small amount will add heat to a large quantity, so it would probably be too strong for your intended application. The foam part I'm inexperienced with, though, but I'd want to dilute the hot sauce linked to above somehow.

I toast for one reason, and one reason alone: if I'm eating it buttered. If I eat a bagel with butter, it needs to be toasted dark and spread with butter while it's still piping hot so it melts into the dough. And I like the flat (and crispy) surface you get from cutting it in half, if I'm buttering it.

I find that some of the Kashi cereals I've tried tend to last longer, particularly Heart to Heart (the Cheerios-type one) and Go Lean Crunch. I don't know about the ones that are more flake-like, but I'm not big on flake-y cereals. I haven't tried the rest of their cereals, but Whole Foods has their own generic Cocoa Puffs (Cosmic Cocos) that survive really well in milk. I suspect their others might also do well. I've always been really picky about this, and tend to avoid cereals that turn to mush within minutes. I also pour the milk into the bowl before the cereal (and might pour in a portion of the cereal at a time). I started doing this as a child; I'm not sure how I figured it out. I think I heard years later that child actors who did cereal commercials would do this (at least when kids used to actually eat the cereal in commercials). Anyway, it means only the bottom layer of cereal is wet, which is pretty important to keeping things as crispy as possible.

Growing up, we didn't really have mixing spoons or whisks around in the house. Chopsticks were the all-purpose mixing/stirring/tossing utensil. We used them to toss freshly dressed salads, beat eggs for omelets (frittata actually), mix the batter for pancakes and matzoh brei, etc.

It's definitely not IBS. The pain and discomfort associated with this is centered around the sphincter that separates my esphogus and stomach, which is the one that is problematic for anyone with GERD. There IS question of whether it is acid or bile, but it doesn't really change treatment. I'd love to go off of medication, and I have with past ones after a month (because I gave up on them since they didn't seem to help), but at this point, I'm matched up too well with Zegerid and if I forget it for a day I notice so I don't want to stop. The last (and best, overwhelmingly) gastroenterologist I've seen was hoping to make medication a short-term solution, combined with the elevated bed, with the hopes that things would heal enough that I could stop medication completely. He even tried some other kinds of medication: an anti-spasmotic (because it's pretty benign but sometimes helps people, especially when stress is a cause) but it didn't do anything; and sucralfate, which actually made symptoms extremely bad (despite also being a relatively safe drug) an hour after I took it. So, despite my doctor's best intentions, we haven't been able to find a solution. I did start therapy several months ago (for several reasons), and asked to have stress reduction to help minimize GERD symptoms to be part of my treatment plan, so hopefully that will help. Certain stressors make it worse, but it's been pretty much ever-present since the symptoms showed up. The only really constant is mild anxiety, since it started when I was still a college student and things have changed a lot since then.

Hmmm, prasantrin, that's a really interesting analysis actually. I do think there is definitely something that makes him uncontroversial or "safe" in that way. I think his popularity was very much a result of when he came onto the scene, which is part of why I wondered out loud if his show was one of the first "ethnic" cooking shows on PBS (or TV in general). I don't remember anyone else besides him doing something that wasn't firmly grounded in European cooking traditions (I guess Mary Ann Esposito's "Ciao Italia" was the only other outlier, because IIRC, everything else was based on classical French cooking). As I mentioned above, I'll always have some sort of nostalgia for him. Honestly, though, I've never thought to buy any of his books, and if I was going to buy a Chinese cookbook I'd probably buy a Fuschia Dunlop book. I don't actually cook that much Chinese food at home.

Some more random things: Question for everyone: do you find that your symptoms are worse during certain times of the year? I'm wondering because this topic coincides with one of the two times of year that I tend to see an increase in severity (the other time is around August/September), and my doctor (internist) actually asked if it seemed to be seasonal. She said she's noticed this trend in patients, but can't draw any sort of conclusion from it. Mjx: I forgot you had said a doctor prescribed anti-anxiety meds to you. One of the only times I didn't have any symptoms at all was when I was taking one for a few days. My husband had to get brain surgery for a benign tumor, and I started having panic attacks in the weeks between the diagnosis and the surgery. My doctor decided to give me a prescription for Lorazepam (Ativan). And you know what? Even though I was still heavily stressed out by the experience despite the medication (I started tearing up when they were doing his intake paperwork, and I burst into tears when we first got to see him after the surgery) those few days I didn't have any symptoms AT ALL. I did not think about needing to eat, feeling nauseous, or anything GERD-related. Of course you can't take anti-anxiety meds without developing tolerance for them, though, so sadly that wasn't a viable long-term option. It made it brutally clear how much of a trigger stress is for me, though (I can always tell how much I'm worrying about things by how bad my symptoms are).

Mjx, when I first got blood tests done (I actually went to the medical center at school somewhere in there) I asked them to test for Celiac disease, because I knew it was a possibility, but it came back negative (fortunately). Otherwise, it doesn't appear that a food allergy or intolerance is at fault, but I haven't been as good as I could have been at trying to figure that out. Darienne, we have a friend (a year older than me) that was diagnosed with GERD after having the same kind of heart attack panic 2 or 3 years ago. Even called an ambulance.

Oh dear, my post was long! I wanted to mention that Pepto Bismol pills have worked well for me when Zegerid isn't enough.

Ah yes, GERD. I'm only in my mid-20s but I first started having symptoms near the end of my spring semester of my junior year of college. I was under a lot of stress at the time. Along with other stressors, I was also working for a professor who was a very difficult boss and, here's probably the big trigger, I would be so worried about coming late or how she would react to me bringing food to work on Fridays (when I worked directly with her) that I would run to my job without eating, start at 12pm, and end at 4pm. So between that and the stress, in the last weeks of the semester, I started to get nauseous often and threw up on several occasions. When I went home I continued to feel nauseous all the time, and after assuming it was some sort of dairy intolerance and not finding anything conclusive (it would get worse when I had milk, like in my cereal, but lactaid pills changed nothing), I went to my doctor. I was told it was "dyspepsia", and told to take Pepcid AC regularly for 2 weeks so my esophogus could heal properly. The Pepcid helped a bit, but after 2 weeks my recovery was stagnant. I started losing weight, because I was so nauseous that I couldn't always eat. (My symptoms present as nausea, not heartburn, and were pretty constant because my triggers were either hunger or having just eaten.) Eventually, I went to a gastroenterologist and after some tests got my first diagnosis of GERD. Since then I've seen two more and gotten another endoscopy to check for ulcers and H. pylori, but nothing was found. Along with the first two doctors I took several PPIs, but they didn't seem to help and I would stop taking the medication and seeing the doctors. Sometimes the symptoms were bothersome, but sometimes I would be so nauseous I couldn't do anything or threw up (or wished I could, for relief). I also had to make sure to have food available at pretty much all times, because if the nausea gets too severe I'm unable to eat. The last doctor I saw told me to start sleeping on an incline and prescribed Zegerid to me, which is omeprazole (Prilosec) and sodium bicarbonate (good ol' baking soda), which seems to help me the most of anything. At this point I take it once a day and try to avoid things, particularly when I'm not feeling well (when I won't be able to contemplate eating it anyway). But that's about as much as I can do. I'm not overweight, so I can't use weight loss as a tactic. I can't (or won't) restrict my diet too strictly because I psychologically cannot bring myself to eat much if everything is bland, but I have cut down trigger foods... if only because I can't contemplate consuming them when I am symptomatic. This includes large amounts of caffeine, tannins, spicy foods, acid, sugar, alcohol, and fat. I get around tannins with tea by drinking tea with milk (the proteins or something else in milk binds to the tannins in the tea). I seem to have no problem drinking lambic and other similar lower alcohol sour beers despite the acid (ironically, tasting something sour is sometimes one thing that makes me feel better), even though the smell of hops makes me nauseous. The thing is, when I've tried to cut out all triggers I don't seem to do significantly better, and my gastroenterologist does not seem to feel I should have to cut out these foods altogether, either. So I'm kind of stuck in place right now, unfortunately. I'd like to go off meds, but I don't seem to have any hope of that right now. My PCP mentioned that there is surgery, but I don't think I'm ready for that route, either (and I haven't talked to my gastro about it).

Doesn't bother me, but I know a lot of the uninitiated are horrified by the use of the words "horse blanket" to describe the nose of a beer (usually something that has Brettanomyces present).

andiesenji, what is the process for pasteurizing eggs yourself?

Google Docs here as well, organized into folders. I have a link to the original source (recipes I collect are always either found on the internet or from magazines that make them available on the internet at least for a limited time) and make changes/alterations in red. Plus I can check what I need when I'm still at work or on my phone at the store, and I read the recipe off my laptop or iPad when cooking.